The NFL draft concluded on Saturday, and the players drafted look about like the players chosen by NFL teams every other year; all of them are male, only about 35% of them are white, and a significant number are of Polynesian ancestry. The NFL is not a government bureaucracy, so personnel decisions are made purely on the basis of the perceived ability of the players to do the jobs the teams hire them to do.

There is no shortage of college football players eager to be drafted. The average annual salary in the NFL is nearly two million dollars, and the competition is fierce.

If the NFL were a government operation, someone would be cooking up some sort of Affirmative Action program to make the teams look more like a proportional representation of the country at large. There would have to be more (meaning any) female players, more white players, more East Asian players, and fewer Polynesian players. (It has been calculated that a boy born in American Samoa is forty times as likely to play NFL football as a boy born in the United States.) 

When the government is in charge, personnel decisions, like all other decisions, are made on the basis of politics.

We see that in play today in the military, where racial bean counters have demanded that the Navy find ways to “cure” the “problem” of too few black men making it through the torturous training and qualification process that the Navy requires for membership in its elite Navy SEALs group.

The letters in SEALS stand for Sea, Air, And Land; and they take the “Sea” part very seriously. Young men have to already be world class swimmers before they even start their SEAL training, and that may be one reason that a large majority of them are white.

There is no shortage of black men in the other elite units of the US military (Army Rangers, Green Berets, Marine Force Recon); and the qualification processes for those groups are just as mentally and physically taxing as the SEALS program, in everything except swimming.

The only way to find “racial injustice” in the military’s elite special forces programs is by excluding most of them and focusing exclusively on the SEALS. The bean counters have done that, of course, and now the Navy has been forced to allocate a big pile of taxpayers’ money to fund a program to “solve” the “problem.”

The Navy has requested bids from diversity contractors who will offer to help recruit more blacks and Hispanics to the SEAL program. The Statement of Work for this program details that the contractor selected will have to start a recruiting program focused on the swim team members at predominantly black colleges, as well as other groups and areas where elite level black and Hispanic swimmers are to be found.

None of this would be necessary if liberals in the government could be satisfied to let the Navy hire SEALS based on the work requirements of the job.

It’s just another example of Fuller’s Law: When the government is in charge, decisions are made politically.